Archive for September 12th, 2008

The writing has gone well this week. Those two already-drafted scenes I mentioned moving up in my WIP? Turns out the first one didn’t work, but the second one meshed well after revisions. I’m giving it the final touches today. (Well, nearly the final touches. Because I re-read chapters as I’m writing, I confess I edit them again. But it’s my process, and it works for me, so there).

I’ve moved the first of the two drafted scenes back in the manuscript again. By moving it up, I realized later that I was trying to rush a secondary story line. A dream about my manuscript turning out 20,000 words below target alerted me to what was going on. 😉 Well, that and re-reading the new chapter that resulted from playing Musical Scenes. It just didn’t sit right. So back to the drawing board, and I came up with a new scene featuring the same POV character at an earlier point in her story arc. As soon as I drafted the new scene, I knew I’d done the right thing, so I dove headlong into revisions. The POV character for this scene is a secondary—the hero’s mother—but her story arc and subplot is every bit as important to her. Therefore, it’s important to me.

It’s challenging, working with secondary story lines. I’m constantly weighing if I’m devoting too much manuscript space to secondary viewpoints, or not enough. However, because I’m an organic writer, I find the best way to judge is to go on “how I feel.” If it “feels right,” then it probably is. And, if it isn’t, I can always revise later.

I find that rarely do I revise later, though. I edit later, but once a drafted scene has been revised for the first time, it becomes part of the core of my story and the next scenes arise from it. That’s what I mean when I say I’m an organic writer. And it’s also why, as much as I appreciate having previously fast-drafted scenes for a huge chunk of this book, the resulting time put into the manuscript isn’t much different. In other words, I’m not writing any faster. However, I do have a clearer idea of where I’m going than I usually do, so there have been benefits, too.